Transformative agreements: Six myths, busted: Lessons learned

Transforming the Scholarly Publishing Lindworm

“…There is a similar lack of transparency seen in TAs as in Hybrid OA journals. According to Farley et al (2021), only 41% of the agreements listed on ESAC have publicly available license details and only 25% of all agreements had detailed costing information, an issue which caused limitations in gathering a sample of licenses for this paper. This perpetual lack of transparency thus undermines one of the core justifications for TAs and thus recreate the inequitable subscription system.…”

“…Since this Declaration was published, there has been an increase in both institutional and consortial deals with subscription‐based publishers to transform their structure from subscription to Open Access using TAs. Though there is no specific definition, broadly speaking, TAs are defined by a contract between an institution or consortia and a publisher in which the publisher agrees to move from a subscription‐based model to an Open Access model (Farley et al 2021). According to the OA2020 Progress Report, there has been an exponential increase in the number of TAs that have been signed in the past six years.…”

“…There are four core components to any TA: a transparent cost that transitions from a subscription fee to an APC fee; the copyright is retained by the author, though the precise method through which this is achieved is not defined; a more transparent license agreement; and the promise to transition to an Open Access model, though no specific timeline is defined (Janicke Hinchcliff 2019; Office of Scholarly Communication 2021). Several models, including read and publish, publish and read, and the offsetting model referenced by MPDL, are therefore all encapsulated in this concept (Farley et al 2021, ESAC 2021). Under the read and publish model, publishers receive two payments that are combined into a singular payment: one for the ability to publish an article and a second for the ability to access the article once published.…”

“…There are no concrete criteria given to provide a standard for the type(s) of OA model(s) a publisher should strive for. Rather, the fees that are paid to the journal would slowly be “re‐purposed” from subscription fees to APC coverage for authors affiliated with the institution that has entered the agreement (Schimmer et al 2015; Farley et al 2021).…”

If not a transformative agreement, then what? Nine questions and answers about an alternative

“…On balance, any upsides that TAs may present are negated by the normalization of paying-to-publish, posing huge problems for equity.I'll refrain from giving you the hard-sell against TAs when others have already done quite a good job of writing those arguments. 1,2,3 Suffice to say, this is not the sort of librarianship that I want to play a part in, where we spend vast sums of money to provide knowledge access for a select few in such a way that ends up excluding the many. But actually, that describes one of the primary roles of the academic library: traditional journal collection development.…”